cultural heritage policy in the library sec-tor, including substantial coverage of digiti-sation aspects. The three main departments above provided the membership of the Branching Out Steering Committee, which is responsible for the implementation of the recommendations of the report. In 2002 the Committee established the Cultural

Heritage Panel, a body with the brief to examine and produce recommendations for a national funding programme in the area of digitisation and digital preservation.

A

s indicated by the slower-than-expected take-up of new delivery

mechanisms such as ADSL and Wireless Broadband, Irish Internet use appears to have reached a plateau. It is reasonable to assume that the people interested in the Internet for its own sake are already online, and that this market has reached near-satu-ration. This also implies that a significant proportion of people do not consider the Internet as relevant. Therefore, the crea-tion of cultural content that is local in nature is viewed as an important stimulus to attract new users to the online medium. The widespread digitisation of local cultur-al content will provide this relevant online material and will have a significant impact on the national take-up of the Information Society.

T

o achieve these aims, the Cultural Heritage Panel established the

Cultural Heritage Project (described below), a six-month pilot project man-aged by An Chomhairle Leabharlanna (The Library Council, http://www.librarycoun-cil.ie), an advisory body on public library policy and development to national and local government. Pintail Ltd (http://www.pintailservices.com) and Digital Media Centre of Dublin Institute of Technology (http://www.dmc.dit.ie/) provided the technical partnership for the project. The Cultural Heritage Project sought to estab-lish national nodes of expertise in the digi-tisation of diverse forms of cultural content, `a national thematic network', and data-bases relevant to digitisation. The project team also sought to produce best practice guidelines in the area of digitisation and a set of recommendations to be published in the project team's final report for a national digitisation funding programme.

T

he national digitisation strategy is being implemented by a nation-

al digitisation programme ­ a network of autonomous digitisation projects on the history and culture of their area with links to a programme portal, which will present aspects of the history and culture of Ireland.

A

s a contribution to the Irish Presidency, Ireland is co-operating

with Italy on a mid-term assessment of the `Coordinating Digitisation in Europe' ini-tiative. The assessment is managed by an assessment steering group, compromised of representatives of the previous (Italian), cur-rent (Irish) and subsequent (Netherlands) presidencies of the European Commission. The focus of the assessment and analysis will be on concrete results, which have a demonstrable impact on the cultural land-scape and which underline the effect of the work of the initiative on the development of eContent and the contribution of cul-tural heritage to eEurope. The draft report was circulated for discussion at the NRG

33

meeting in Parma (November 2003).

Projects in brief:

Cultural Heritage Project

T

he objectives of the Cultural Heritage Project Phase I were to create a por-

tal, showcase and resource of digitised material from the local history collections of the public libraries and local museums and archives across Ireland, and to create a level of digitisation expertise within these institutions. It was intended that this project would also facilitate greater access to the collections housed in these institutions, both online and in terms of an increase in actual visits to the libraries, museums and archives. Finally it was envisaged that, by populating the site with such relevant local material, a greater degree of Internet take-up in Ireland would be encouraged.